The Weary Exhibitionist

Recent stories reveal Facebook’s hand-wringing over the current “content collapse,” where users are sharing less personal material and more secondhand posts (just passing along news articles, videos of cats playing the piano in a tutu, stuff like that). One prevailing theory for said collapse suggests that as folk’s networks have expanded to include God-knows-who, people have grown more reticent to hand off their privacy to the vague crowd. I’m sure there’s merit to this, but I can imagine other reasons why we might be seeing more memes of Trump and Bernie and less stories about our wild weekend escapade or words from that novel that made us weep.

Further, I think this conversation has resonance with what many of us experience in the fuller experience of our life, even if we’ve never once clicked into that alternate universe known as Facebook. Why are many of us becoming more careful about what we broadcast within our circle of friends (real ones)? Why do so many of us find ourselves withdrawing a little more, growing a little more quiet, sharing a little less?

One reason may simply be that we’re growing tired of ourselves. The exhibitionism of our narcissistic age has flat exhausted us. We’re tapped out. We’ve discovered that though we have good things to say (we really do) and though our voice matters (it truly does), it’s exhausting to try to be as clever or profound or unique as is required to maintain the high that comes from that first hit of recognition. It’s marvelous to be seen as the smart one, the accomplished one, but pursuing such a thing will likely crush us.

It’s one thing to offer what we have, with courage and without apology. It’s another thing to be unable to have a sense of ourselves apart from a steady stream of affirmation. Maybe some of us realize we’ve been promoting a life for too long; we want to get on with living it.

3 Replies to “The Weary Exhibitionist”

  1. aaaaaaaaaaaaamen. And It’s my marriage and early teenagers that all thrive on my undistracted presence that has given me the courage to have these boundaries and ENJOY them. Thank you for saying this!

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